1 The wide range of payments, from $5 to $2,000 with a median of $155, also surprised her. "Everyone is worried so much about payment," says Grady, "but the amounts were pretty modest."
The only thing that seemed clear was that "there doesn't seem to be a lot of clarity," she says.
Ethicists worry about payment because of two theoretical concerns. First, money may tempt people to agree to take risks they might not take otherwise. "If money clouds your judgment, it's doing something that we would all consider unacceptable," says Scott Halpern, a senior fellow in the University of Pennsylvania's department of bioethics. Second, money may be a stronger incentive for the poor than for the wealthy, putting the disadvantaged at even higher risk.
Halpern and his colleagues decided to test those theoretical concerns. They asked 126 patients with mild to moderate hypertension how they felt ...
